I have been going back and forth with brainwashed Covidians on the Nextdoor app and there are some people who are wearing N95s all day every day even in their cars while driving alone. They are still shunning contact with the public and refuse to eat in a public restaurant. It cannot be healthy to hide from germs for years. Doesn’t a well functioning immune system need to be challenged occasionally to maintain optimal efficiency? This thought seems to never occur to these people. All this to avoid feeling crappy for a few days. It is basically a religious cult at this point.
Thanks Dr. Prasad for the regular doses of common sense. I love hearing from intelligent sane people.
"... for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before." Vinay, I'm at a loss to understand why you remain blind to the many vaccine-damaged people - including older adults - who regret ever having been vaccinated at all. Is it "science" to ignore one side of the risk/benefit equation?
Thank you. Unfortunately it seems the deluded are also determined to share their “mitigation” plan in perpetuity.
In my area, just yesterday the National Park Service mandated mask wearing at the Harpers Ferry National Park. This is an outdoor rural park that borders the Shenandoah River in West Virginia.
Vinay, Sadly you do not read these comments. I am sure I could get funding for you to run an RCT on masking at UCSF. You run dozens of RCTs and often complain that this one, clearly the most obvious, has not been run. Why not run it yourself?
As a 64 year old oncologist I cannot express how awkward, unnecessary, draining, useless, stupid, insane, anti-social and frustrating it is to have to wear a mask in the hospital and the clinic. I don’t even know what my patients in the past 2 plus years look like!
I wonder if Katie Porter spread the virus to anyone else, even inadvertantly? She should probably just be fired, to be on the safe side, to maintain the integrity of her personal policies.
"All things being equal, for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before."... So here's the rub, all things aren't equal. These transfection products cause severe reactions in some people up to death. Death in younger adults who were never at any significant risk from the viirus. It is unpredictable, who will be severely impacted (beyond the proven increased risk of myocarditis in adolescent and young men). There is nearly daily news of a 30 or 40 something year old in a highly vaxxed profession (entertainment, medicine, professional sports) dying suddenly and unexpectedly. Now we have the new research on IgG class switching that looks like multiple injections may lead to immune tolerance and possibly an impairment of body to recognize and destroy cancer cells (IgG3 goes away and IgG4 ramps up big time). When you write statements like the one above, you encourage people who thus far, have not taken 1 of the shots or encourage people who received earlier shots to get a booster, which is at best useless and at worse dangerous with negative efficacy. I realize you know all of this, but just ask you to please consider revising your public stance on the safety of these products. You have people paying attention to you, and they deserve the whole story.
“Some point to sustained Covid-19 deaths, but this is incorrect. No one is hospitalized with ARDS anymore, deaths are largely incidental.”
I think you’re right, Vinay. I’ve suspected for a while that current “Covid-19 death” figures share the same problem as “Covid hospitalization” stats: counting people who did test positive for Covid-19, but died of something else.
Is there any published evidence to back this up? If so, we badly need to know about it.
The media constantly push the narrative that ordinary Americans have become numb to unacceptable numbers of deaths. These could be prevented if everyone masked up, or got multiple boosters, but we selfishly choose not to – and public officials are too cowardly to force us to do the right thing. And so we are throwing society’s most vulnerable (especially the elderly) under the bus.
It very well may be that unacceptable numbers of older people ARE dying, but for different reasons: healthcare and income inequality, social isolation, hospital understaffing, lack of primary care, etc. If so, we need to tackle these problems instead of blaming ordinary people for their supposed callousness.
What REALLY blows my mind is that so many believe in fear that is still being pushed by media - “Tripledemic” is about the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life, but people seem to beg for that kind of info to keep wearing masks and act like every single human is a cesspool of flu, Covid, and RSV. I find it sad more than anything. Long Covid, in my opinion is long fear. I have crohns and take inflixumab. I’ve had Covid - it’s no joke - but I can live in a world WITH it now. I took the moderna shot and a booster being a healthcare provider but will not take anymore at this time, and not likely ever again. Of note - the antivaxxers are just as nuts in my opinion, but that’s another thread and one I hope you write about.
I still see quite a few kids and young adults wearing masks outside, even when alone. My bro saw someone wearing a mask in the sauna and plenty of people wearing them while using the stairclimber or treadmill at the gym.
And I've said this time and time again ... if someone is that worried about catching what is essentially a cold for most people ... then why go to a crowded indoor place at all? Why not just work out at home or outdoors? Why not have groceries delivered to your home or to your car in the parking lot?
I still know people and see people I don't know who insist upon wearing masks "just to be on the safe side" or for other silly unscientific reasons. I've stopped trying to discuss it with them as they are still in a state of fear nearly 3 years after the initial pay-op. Several things remain clear to me about masking:
1. The public health department has failed miserably, possibly on purpose, or possibly through incompetence to delineate clear science-based guidelines on mask usage. Naturally, people remain confused. This state of confusion is a public health problem that has been created by our public health (should we call them public illness?) departments.
2. Mask-wearing is harmful to others, by engendering baseless fears in people who are confused and don't know what the true dangers are because the public health officials have kept them in the dark. They are instruments by which people have been coopted into fulfilling what is essentially a terrorist agenda by government. Mask wearing is a veiled (pun intended) form of terrorism by proxy.
3. Mask-wearing is harmful to the mask-wearer, by raising CO2 levels, possibly causing hypoxia, exposing oneself to higher inoculums of germs by rebreathing one's own mice-organisms, and by keeping oneself in a state of fear, which probably lowers immune functioning.
4. That this has been permitted to go on by politicians and no clarity insisted upon so the public isn't left thinking that masking is a matter of choice, like gender is a matter of choice, and such nonsense is contributing to the dissolution of truth, responsibility and integrity in our society. This kind of moral relativism (you can mask if you want to) has no place in sane society. The risks and benefits need to be ascertained, explained and acted upon by public officials in an appropriate manner. All else is insanity.
A related problem: Over and over, I hear the percentage of Covid deaths that involve older folks is rising fast. This is then used to imply that the number of Covid deaths in elders is skyrocketing—and our post-Covid lifestyle is what’s killing them. But if overall deaths were way down in 2022 compared to 2021, then the numbers of elders dying of Covid should be down as well – even if they are 90% of the dead in 2022, compared to 70% in 2021. Right?
Let’s say total deaths were 450,000 in 2021, and 200,000 in 2022. And let’s say 70% of the dead in 2021 were over 65, compared to 90% in 2022. Those figures (whether true or not) are pretty close to the ones I’ve heard bandied about. That would mean 315,000 elders died of Covid in 2021, and 180,000 in 2022. The percentage is going up, but the overall numbers have gone way down!
I have been going back and forth with brainwashed Covidians on the Nextdoor app and there are some people who are wearing N95s all day every day even in their cars while driving alone. They are still shunning contact with the public and refuse to eat in a public restaurant. It cannot be healthy to hide from germs for years. Doesn’t a well functioning immune system need to be challenged occasionally to maintain optimal efficiency? This thought seems to never occur to these people. All this to avoid feeling crappy for a few days. It is basically a religious cult at this point.
Thanks Dr. Prasad for the regular doses of common sense. I love hearing from intelligent sane people.
"... for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before." Vinay, I'm at a loss to understand why you remain blind to the many vaccine-damaged people - including older adults - who regret ever having been vaccinated at all. Is it "science" to ignore one side of the risk/benefit equation?
Thank you. Unfortunately it seems the deluded are also determined to share their “mitigation” plan in perpetuity.
In my area, just yesterday the National Park Service mandated mask wearing at the Harpers Ferry National Park. This is an outdoor rural park that borders the Shenandoah River in West Virginia.
This idiocy has to end.
Vinay, Sadly you do not read these comments. I am sure I could get funding for you to run an RCT on masking at UCSF. You run dozens of RCTs and often complain that this one, clearly the most obvious, has not been run. Why not run it yourself?
"All things being equal, for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before."
I thought you were evidence based Vinay? What evidence exists to support this statement?
As a 64 year old oncologist I cannot express how awkward, unnecessary, draining, useless, stupid, insane, anti-social and frustrating it is to have to wear a mask in the hospital and the clinic. I don’t even know what my patients in the past 2 plus years look like!
I wonder if Katie Porter spread the virus to anyone else, even inadvertantly? She should probably just be fired, to be on the safe side, to maintain the integrity of her personal policies.
"All things being equal, for most adults, you will do much better meeting COVID-19 after vaccination then before."... So here's the rub, all things aren't equal. These transfection products cause severe reactions in some people up to death. Death in younger adults who were never at any significant risk from the viirus. It is unpredictable, who will be severely impacted (beyond the proven increased risk of myocarditis in adolescent and young men). There is nearly daily news of a 30 or 40 something year old in a highly vaxxed profession (entertainment, medicine, professional sports) dying suddenly and unexpectedly. Now we have the new research on IgG class switching that looks like multiple injections may lead to immune tolerance and possibly an impairment of body to recognize and destroy cancer cells (IgG3 goes away and IgG4 ramps up big time). When you write statements like the one above, you encourage people who thus far, have not taken 1 of the shots or encourage people who received earlier shots to get a booster, which is at best useless and at worse dangerous with negative efficacy. I realize you know all of this, but just ask you to please consider revising your public stance on the safety of these products. You have people paying attention to you, and they deserve the whole story.
“Some point to sustained Covid-19 deaths, but this is incorrect. No one is hospitalized with ARDS anymore, deaths are largely incidental.”
I think you’re right, Vinay. I’ve suspected for a while that current “Covid-19 death” figures share the same problem as “Covid hospitalization” stats: counting people who did test positive for Covid-19, but died of something else.
Is there any published evidence to back this up? If so, we badly need to know about it.
The media constantly push the narrative that ordinary Americans have become numb to unacceptable numbers of deaths. These could be prevented if everyone masked up, or got multiple boosters, but we selfishly choose not to – and public officials are too cowardly to force us to do the right thing. And so we are throwing society’s most vulnerable (especially the elderly) under the bus.
It very well may be that unacceptable numbers of older people ARE dying, but for different reasons: healthcare and income inequality, social isolation, hospital understaffing, lack of primary care, etc. If so, we need to tackle these problems instead of blaming ordinary people for their supposed callousness.
What REALLY blows my mind is that so many believe in fear that is still being pushed by media - “Tripledemic” is about the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life, but people seem to beg for that kind of info to keep wearing masks and act like every single human is a cesspool of flu, Covid, and RSV. I find it sad more than anything. Long Covid, in my opinion is long fear. I have crohns and take inflixumab. I’ve had Covid - it’s no joke - but I can live in a world WITH it now. I took the moderna shot and a booster being a healthcare provider but will not take anymore at this time, and not likely ever again. Of note - the antivaxxers are just as nuts in my opinion, but that’s another thread and one I hope you write about.
Terrific, crisp, clearrecapitulation of our current situation. Thanks for writing this!
I still see quite a few kids and young adults wearing masks outside, even when alone. My bro saw someone wearing a mask in the sauna and plenty of people wearing them while using the stairclimber or treadmill at the gym.
And I've said this time and time again ... if someone is that worried about catching what is essentially a cold for most people ... then why go to a crowded indoor place at all? Why not just work out at home or outdoors? Why not have groceries delivered to your home or to your car in the parking lot?
Except they changed the definition of dying with Covid in March 2022. You can confirm this by looking at graph of Hospitalizations and Death.
I still know people and see people I don't know who insist upon wearing masks "just to be on the safe side" or for other silly unscientific reasons. I've stopped trying to discuss it with them as they are still in a state of fear nearly 3 years after the initial pay-op. Several things remain clear to me about masking:
1. The public health department has failed miserably, possibly on purpose, or possibly through incompetence to delineate clear science-based guidelines on mask usage. Naturally, people remain confused. This state of confusion is a public health problem that has been created by our public health (should we call them public illness?) departments.
2. Mask-wearing is harmful to others, by engendering baseless fears in people who are confused and don't know what the true dangers are because the public health officials have kept them in the dark. They are instruments by which people have been coopted into fulfilling what is essentially a terrorist agenda by government. Mask wearing is a veiled (pun intended) form of terrorism by proxy.
3. Mask-wearing is harmful to the mask-wearer, by raising CO2 levels, possibly causing hypoxia, exposing oneself to higher inoculums of germs by rebreathing one's own mice-organisms, and by keeping oneself in a state of fear, which probably lowers immune functioning.
4. That this has been permitted to go on by politicians and no clarity insisted upon so the public isn't left thinking that masking is a matter of choice, like gender is a matter of choice, and such nonsense is contributing to the dissolution of truth, responsibility and integrity in our society. This kind of moral relativism (you can mask if you want to) has no place in sane society. The risks and benefits need to be ascertained, explained and acted upon by public officials in an appropriate manner. All else is insanity.
Vinay, You and Monica Ghandi are getting closer to agreement than ever.
A related problem: Over and over, I hear the percentage of Covid deaths that involve older folks is rising fast. This is then used to imply that the number of Covid deaths in elders is skyrocketing—and our post-Covid lifestyle is what’s killing them. But if overall deaths were way down in 2022 compared to 2021, then the numbers of elders dying of Covid should be down as well – even if they are 90% of the dead in 2022, compared to 70% in 2021. Right?
Let’s say total deaths were 450,000 in 2021, and 200,000 in 2022. And let’s say 70% of the dead in 2021 were over 65, compared to 90% in 2022. Those figures (whether true or not) are pretty close to the ones I’ve heard bandied about. That would mean 315,000 elders died of Covid in 2021, and 180,000 in 2022. The percentage is going up, but the overall numbers have gone way down!